When the female left the nest, I quickly rigged the camera into the tree and made a hasty retreat to watch what was going on, without disturbing the nest.

Over the next few weeks, I watched with amazement, the goings on hidden in my hedgerow, and captured everything from the eggs, first hatching, and fledging, and watched the behaviour of both adults and the four chicks.

All in all, I have some 12 - 13 hours of footage, so a very daunting task to cut this into a watchable sequence. Although watching it all live on the monitor was amazing, the amount of clips captured and the relatively low quality of the security camera have put me off doing anything with it.....Until Now!


Following on from the wildlife film course at folly farm, I have been given the inspiration to once again pick up this project. Having now reviewed some of the footage (and found some I forgot I had), I am excited about cutting this together. The low quality shots of the nest do intensely annoy me as does having to match 4:3 to 16:9 shots, but with careful editing and flow, I am hoping that it won’t be too much of a distraction and, that what is going on in front of the lens, holds the viewers attention.


There is still some converting to do to from windows AVI interlaced to quicktime, and lots of sorting out to do. I did keep notes at the time of filming and the tips from the filming course regarding story structure will help greatly.

Tags: blackbirds